The Technology Outlook: STEM+ Education 2012-2017 is part of a longitudinal research study of emerging technologies that began in March 2002. Since that time, under the banner of the Horizon Project, the NMC and its research partners have held an ongoing series of conversations and dialogs with its advisory boards — a group that now numbers nearly 500 technology professionals, campus technologists, faculty leaders from colleges and universities, museum professionals, teachers and other school professionals, and representatives of leading corporations from more than 30 countries. For more than a decade, these conversations have been mined to provide the insights on emerging technology that are published annually in the NMC Horizon Report series.

The NMC Horizon Project is currently in its tenth year, dedicated to charting the landscape of emerging technologies for teaching, learning, and creative inquiry in education globally. In 2008, the NMC added to the three main NMC Horizon Reports a new series of regional and sector-based studies, called the NMC Technology Outlooks, with the dual goals of understanding how technology is being absorbed using a smaller lens, and also noting the contrasts between technology use in one area or field compared to another. To date, the NMC has conducted studies of technology uptake in Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and Iberoamerica, and has plans in place to expand that research to Central Europe, India, Singapore, and Brazil. The flagship NMC Horizon Report, focused on higher education, is translated into multiple languages every year. Over all editions, the readership of the reports is estimated at over one million worldwide, with readers in over 100 countries.

This project, the Technology Outlook: STEM+ Education 2012-2017, is the first of its kind in the Horizon Report series. It focuses specifically on STEM+ education and the emerging technologies, key trends, and critical challenges that are impacting it. The members of the horizon.stem advisory board were purposely chosen to represent a broad spectrum in STEM+ education; key writers, thinkers, technologists, and futurists from education, business, and industry round out the group.

In this wiki, they will be engaging in a comprehensive review and analysis of research, articles, papers, blogs, and interviews; discussing existing applications, and brainstorming new ones; and ultimately ranking the items on the list of candidate technologies for their potential relevance to teaching, learning, or research in STEM+ education. The results of this ranking will be published in a theTechnology Outlook: STEM+ Education 2012-2017.